But Yvette Seymour Stukeley had prayed for Colonel de Warrenne nightly for seven years and had idealized him beyond recognition. Possibly Fate’s greatest kindness to her was to ordain that she should not see him as he had become in fact, and compare him with her wondrous mental image…. The boy was to her, must be, should be, the very image of her life’s hero and beloved….
The depolarized and bewildered Damocles found himself in a strange and truly foreign land, a queer, cold, dismal country inhabited by vast quantities of “second-class sahibs,” as he termed the British lower middle-class and poor, a country of a strange greenness and orderedness, where there were white servants, strangely conjoined rows of houses in the villages, dangerous-looking fires inside the houses, a kind of tomb-stones on all house-tops, strange horse-drawn vehicles, butlerless and ghari[[9]]-less sahibs, and an utter absence of “natives,” sepoys, byle-gharies,[[10]] camels, monkeys, kites, squirrels, bulbuls, minahs,[[11]] mongooses, palm-trees, and temples. Cattle appeared to have no humps, crows to have black heads, and trees to have no fruit. The very monsoon seemed inextricably mixed with the cold season. Fancy the rains coming in the cold weather! Perhaps there was no hot weather and nobody went to the hills in this strange country of strange people, strange food, strange customs. Nobody seemed to have any tents when they left the station for the districts, nor to take any bedding when they went on tour or up-country. A queer, foreign land.
[9] Carriage.
[10] Bullock-carts.
[11] A kind of starling.
But Monksmead was a most magnificent “bungalow” standing in a truly beautiful “compound”—wherein the very bhistis[[12]] and mallis were European and appeared to be second-class sahibs.
[12] Water-carriers.
Marvellous was the interior of the bungalow with its countless rooms and mountainous stair-cases (on the wall of one of which hung the Sword which he had never seen but instantly recognized) and its army of white servants headed by the white butler (so like the Chaplain of Bimariabad in grave respectability and solemn pompousness) and its extraordinary white “ayahs” or maids, and silver-haired Mrs. Pont, called the “house-keeper”. Was she a pukka Mem-Sahib or a nowker[[13]] or what? And how did she “keep” the house?
[13] Servant.
A wonderful place—but far and away the most thrilling and delightful of its wonders was the little white girl, Lucille—Damocles’ first experience of the charming genus.